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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

An Unpredictable Moment

I hesitate to write this post because it involves a subject that real ladies don’t talk about.So I’m going to do my best to explain what happened in as delicate and ladylike manner as I can muster.I want to apologize in advance if I offend anyone’s sensibilities, and promise my mother and my aunt and anyone else who’s reading this that I am always very ladylike on a regular basis and I hope you won’t disown me.

Firstly, you need to understand that VelcroDog Charlie is a little. . . well, simple about some things.VelcroDog Sammy can look into a mirror and understand that he’s looking at an image of himself.To Charlie, a mirror is no more interesting than a wall.When someone knocks on a door in a TV show, it’s Charlie that hightails it to the front door barking his little head off.And as you already know, it’s Charlie who’s afraid of things like wind, paper and the beam of light from a flashlight.If VelcroDogs are sitting on me (and when aren’t they these days???) and my stomach growls, Sammy is hopeful that I’ll be heading to the kitchen soon where doggie treatswill fall magically from the refrigerator.Charlie glares menacingly at my stomach and growls back

One other thing before I go on with this story. It is important to take a moment to consider some of the touted differences between the sexes.There is an age in every man’s young life, for instance, when he thinks he invented the burp and that it is the most comically sidesplitting talent a human could ever develop.Young girls, however, don’t stoop to such base and crass humor, choosing instead to develop proficiency in the loftier trades like perfecting the sulk and sneaking lipstick past Mom.Besides, everyone knows that ladies don’t burp or make any of those other gross bodily noises in which the male species seems to revel.

Except - forgive me, ladies, for outing our gender - but we do.Heaven help me, but I’m here to tell you that left alone and unattended, under the right set of very unusual circumstances we ladies can be just as...um...noisy as our male counterparts. Especially if we’ve had general anesthesia and surgery followed by drugs, and our tummies are all discombobulated and trying to recuperate and we’re not sleeping and are all out of sorts - at these times, our bodies can be ...well... unpredictable.

See, I was sitting on the couch this morning and had an ...unpredictable... sort of moment.It was just a moment.Not a big moment or anything, just a regular sort of unpredictable moment if one is given over to that sort of thing but it was a moment you could sort of, well ... hear, if you catch my meaning.

And that’s when Charlie, who had been draped lazily over my lap, shot off the couch like he’d been poked with a sharp stick.He stood growling and barking at the couch like it had some sort of monster in it.For the next twenty minutes, this dopey little dog patrolled the living room like the German shepherd he longs to be because he was convinced that what he heard (which was, I assure you, only the tiniest, most delicate itty bitty little sound) came from somewhere inside the vast innards of my couch.

That Sammy and I were still sitting on the couch unharmed didn’t even register in his tiny little doggie mind.No amount of coaxing could make him calm down.Something had made a noise he’d never heard before and it was living in our couch cushions.He growled.He snarled; he pranced; he barked.He yapped so hard his little feet came up off the floor.Finally, after much goose-like head bobbing and hackled-up fur, he leaped warily onto the arm of the couch and there he settled like some misinformed sentry, glaring and growling under his breath until AOK came home for lunch.

Of course, I had to explain to AOK what was up with Charlie.I tried my darndest to gloss over what caused the situation, hoping instead to focus on Charlie’s resulting overreaction.

Which brings us once again to another big difference between men and women.A woman should be allowed to retain a certain air of ladylike refinement even if she's done something that leaves her husband rolling on the floor laughing.